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About 40-thousand children go to the hospital with burn injuries every year -- scalded by the sun, hot stoves, fireworks and coffee. But there’s a burn hazard on the playground you might not know about -- and one woman is out to change that.
Amy Ruzicka shadows her son Andrew around the playground. The two year old had a big scare on this plastic slide.
"Immediately upon going down the slide he started screaming," said Ruzicka.
At the hospital, doctors treated the toddler for second-degree burns on his hands, legs and stomach.
“He was screaming in a lot of pain … eventually had to give him morphine through the IV. Then they had to knock him out to perform a procedure to actually scrap the blisters off his hand so they could heal properly,” Ruzicka said.
Burn expert and nurse at St. Louis Children's Hospital Carrie Wilson says it doesn’t take much for young children to get hurt.
“Children are like the elderly, their skin is very thin. They can sustain very severe burn injuries even at a very short amount of time at higher degrees,” Wilson told Ivanhoe.
Any object that can reach 120 degrees can burn a child in seconds. We checked five plastic slides in the midday heat. All reached dangerous temperatures.
Andrew’s hands are healing with treatment to avoid infection. But his mom knows things could have been worse.
"We wanted to get the word out so this doesn’t happen to anyone else," said Ruzicka.
If you read the small print, parks may warn parents to check for hot surfaces. But this mom is lobbying for better playground design before another child is hurt.
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